Depends what they want from the conversion. I am tending to recommend Ubuntu/Kubuntu for people with modern PCs and BeatriX for those with older machines. But everyone has a different distro to suit and that distro choice tends to develop to other distros over time.
Try this (the great Linux distribution chooser) :
http://www.zegeniestudios.net/ldc/

In contrast, there is one Windows, One Mac OS that is compatible with every other version of said OS.

?????

Actually, there are many different versions of windows, and Mac OS

ever wondered why there is windows 1,2,3.1,WFW,95.98, 98SE.ME,2000,XPhome,XPPro,2003
(there are actually 3 seperate versions of XP)
and all the other versions like 2003 webedition, SBS, Enterprise,etc,etc....

and why there are 10 versions of Mac OS?

none of these are 100% compatable with each other, and nor are the various versions of office, publisher,adobe apps, etc,etc,etc,

Plus anyone who expects to just install windows will have a pc he can do very little with.

I recently upgraded my dual boot machine.
To reinstall my windows XP partition with all the apps, settings, email history etc, that I needed took 4+ hours, 12 reboots, and quite a bit of fiddling.
To reinstall suse 9.3 just involved copying my home directory across and installing. took about 45 minutes.

Last edited by wyliecoyoteuk on Tue Aug 23, 2005 9:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

In fact MacOS compatabilty is emulated I believe, certainly between newer PPC and older chip generations it is.
Windows is notorious for having compatibilty problems between generations (1-2,3,9X,NT). As far as I am aware (from reports from our sister company as we don't use Windows here) Publisher 2003 cannot open Publisher XP/2000 files.

Don't even get me started on the Word/Works problem I have in school....

""No, Word doesn't open works files, urmmm, yes I know its Microsoft, but that doesn't mean it will work.....here have a copy of OO.org, no that won't open works files either, but at least your be able to bring your coursework into school""

It's a bit like me saving some files with Gnumeric, as .gnumeric files, and opening them with KSpreadsheet, which alledgely handles gnumeric files, only to file they're blank...

Did you know the wheel bearings of a 1987 Metro are different and incompatible with the 1986 and 1988 (which are the same) models? It ain't just Windows apps that don't work together. Most of 'life' doesn't either... <sigh>

Dell's ATX connectors up to Pentuim 3 (maybe even to date) were wired differently to standard ATX so you blew the motherboard when you tried to upgrade or buy a PSU from anyone except Dell (athough you can buy a converter for a few quid).
Anyway, what was the point of this thread again?

pilchard wrote:okay , here goes , i am from albany in western australia , i have been playing with computers for about twenty five years , in all that time Linux is the only o.s that has really excited me , mainly by its potential , but wouldn't you know it , as far as i can see this potential is being stiffled by "unfriendliness" Before any one gets on thier high horse , just think about it , the only reason tha Bill #$% Gates has so many users is that it " appears to work out of the box " maybe it does and may be it doesn't but hear me now , you are all fooling yourselves if you think that Tarballs , Emacs , dependancies and probably Twenty or more Distros are going to threaten Microsoft ,I tried Mandriva on my new ADSL Router setup yesterday , it crashed everything , I don't care why it did or what the simple nerd solution is , it just crashed .I installed Suse 9.2 and after an Hour or so I have two windows XP and Suse working off the net , if I had kept an only Windows setup it would have takev 10 minutes.I am commited to supporting and running everything Linux but I cannot believe you are all serious about beating Gates on the desktop.

At the moment No. But then, they reckoned the car wouldn't replace the horse. Oh yeah, IBM once counted a maximum need of, what?, six computers worldwide? And don't forget '1 Samuel 17:1-58'...

Why should it matter how long it takes to install anyway? Yes Windows is quick to install (more than 10 minutes on any machine though unless it is a clone) but you add Office and all the other apps the a basic Linux install comes with and I think you will find a Windows install is slower. If you are talking 10 minutes being a clone setup then Linux and any other operating system takes around 10 minutes as well.

Don't foget this quote:
"The Internet? We are not interested in it" - Bill Gates, 1993

I must admit, somethings even wind me up - This business with the gnumeric files. I went to install Gnumeric, & YaST informed me I woul dhave to install a total of 118 MB of stuff, just to meet the depedencies. Sod that.
But then again, it ain't as bad as this problem

I think that is becuase Gnumeric is GTK based and SUSE doesn't install the GTK libaries by default (I could be wrong though).
The problem you linked to unfortunately is not unique, but untrained business professionals will still make the same mistakes because they don't know better.
I was half asleep last night but I'm sure I saw a TV ad from IBM that was dissing Linux over its Unix system. I could be wrong though.

Just a quick note about Office and Works - Office can open Works documents if the converter was installed. I know because I had to do this for a student today so he could hand in his assignment 20 minutes before the deadline. Works has never been able to open Office documents - that is why Microsoft provided free "viewers" for Office 97 (which is when they changed to a binary file format).

[whisper]I also pointed out that OpenOffice 1.9m122 would make a better option as it could open and save MS Office format documents for free.[/whisper]

I agree that windwows does appear tow ork out of the box, but as many have said it is only appear. I remember buying my first copy of Windows XP, thats right i actually bought it! I put the CD in and booted off that etc. Went through all the steps, halfway through installing it suffered an unrecoverable error. I rebooted and began the process again, same issue. The cd was not scratched or damaged that I could see, so I took it back to PC World who said they could not refund or replace because I'd opened the box. So I wrote to M$ from work, explaining my situation. The response? "We suggest you purchase another copy" So the disc went in the bin and I went with Win 2K.
Now take my current Gentoo system. Built from source from the LXF cover disc issue 68 (thanks very much for that by the way) it took me around two days on and off to install everythign I wanted including X and KDE. I realise two days is muhc more than most people would want, but if you want a system built for your machine on your machine then thats the way to go.
My first experience of Linux was Mandrake it took me 40 minutes to install and ran perfectly. There were a few bug updates that i needed but got those quickly and with no restart.
The ability to restrict users has been invaluable, and I cannot say that I miss the "stability" that Windows suppossedly provides. I remember the constant war against malware all to well, one wrong click on the net and that could be the end of your system.
Now if anyone does get round to writing something more than a proof of concept virus for Linux, then assuming they make one that effects something on my system, the only place it will infect is my home folder. Unless I do something stupid as root my system has that last line of defence.
When asking is M$ better than Linux? it depends what distro you use, whether you have paid for support and what you want it to do. In my experience I have never known M$ to install quicker than certain distros of linux